Adriana Spadoni

“ Charlotte Welles looked up with such gentle understanding of her bitterness and hurt that Anne wanted to strike her. What right had this woman to penetrate one's mood, to be always down there under the surface of one's thoughts? It was as if she had entered a room locked against her.
"Why, Annie!"
Anne ignored Hilda and went on in a rapid, cracking voice.
"How on earth you can believe such rubbish, I don't know. And to call it science! If science is anything, it's the seeking of effect from cause. Something happens, and you burrow far enough down under the surface and find the cause. ”

“ Like the three prongs of a huge fork, Black Tom, Roger and Katya caught up on their unflagging faith and indefatigable energy the smaller plans and physical limitations of those about them.
Often Anne came from a revery to find that her hands had been idle on the keyboard for a long time. There was no safe, quiet spot anywhere in life. The surface at every point was heaving, just as the surface of the earth had heaved and cracked on the day of the Great Quake, torn open by forces within itself. Until then the earth had been the most stable thing in the universe. ”

“ She often wondered how Jerome would stand the loneliness of Alice's marriage and sometimes, for a moment, Alice's going so eagerly out to the happiness Jerome's loving care had made possible, seemed cruelly selfish, until Jean thought of Martha and smiled. How imperceptibly one's viewpoint glided from youth to age, and how alike was all youth and how alike all age. In middle life the wandering paths of youth met, and when one reached that spot, one picked up the waiting burden of loneliness and understanding and staggered away with it, groaning or smiling according to one's pride. ”

“ There will be times—Mary, you don't know what it means to die inside, to see and never to feel, not even anger, to have nothing sharper than memory."
"And you don't know, Jean," Mary spoke slowly and rose from her chair as if she had grown very tired, "what it means to have been emotionally comfortable all your life. Never to have gone down nor up. Never to have died nor been alive. To have grown old in comfort. A kind of paradox, isn't it, to have been always so comfortable that sometimes it hurts." ”

“ Anne thrust her book aside. If she went out to walk, the Sunday streets would echo the tread of others trying to kill the day in the same way. At the flat James would be asleep in his chair, Hilda napping in the dining-room. Anne leaned forward, her elbows on the sill, her chin in her palms. The Bay, flat and gray as if it, too, were exhausted from the week's work, stretched to the fog-crowned hills. Under the pall, the Sleeping Beauty on Tamalpais had passed to eternal rest. The commanded peace of the Seventh Day shut like a cover of lead upon the world. ”

“ Jean said slowly, "and I wish I had never come."
Pat started as if Jean had called to her for help and the little doctor said sharply:
"You don't like interviewing?"
"I despise it! It's the most futile, useless round of senseless rush that was ever invented to waste one's days. It means nothing at all to the one who does it or to any one else. It's just words, words, and more words."
For several moments Dr. Mary said nothing, but sat looking at Jean with an odd look in her small, bright eyes.
"If I am rude, you must pardon me, Mrs. Herrick, but why do you do it, if you feel that way?" ”

“ But the strangeness of seeing Anne and Rogie in these surroundings, his ignorance of all that had happened to them in the last months, wrapped Roger like a fog, through which he felt Anne receding from him.
But, for the first time, the room was not hideous to Anne. The damp smell of Roger's clothes, the lingering cigarette smoke, filled it with a throbbing vitality it had never had. She felt Roger's masculinity in the very air and it made the few small remarks she managed to catch from the whirling mass of feeling seem thin and artificial. ”

“ The world was strangely alone, shut in by itself, like a madman locked in his cell. Driven from infinity, rushing on to infinity, the wind tore by them on its ceaseless quest.
Herrick took her hand and they began to run to a little beach wedged between the cliffs. As they ran Jean was filled with a deep sureness, as if she could run so forever, swifter and swifter, never halting or stumbling, borne up by a strength within; a strength that was beating out against the whole surface of her body, in an effort to join the main current of all life, that touched her on every side. ”

“ Roger spoke almost sadly, so that Belle and Dr. Stetson looked toward him, puzzled; but Anne, her face flushing, looked down. "It's the great, sane, middle class that's holding back liberty—killing it. The rich, to a certain extent, have it. The poor are struggling for it. It's only in the middle that they're dead, and safe. The middle class. There is no middle class, really. It is the dividing class. It's the blow-neither-hot-nor-cold. It's the lackey-souled. It's the misfortune of any country that has it, this great, sane, safe, middle class." ”

“ Again Gregory felt the silence of the street about them, then the clatter of the taxi as it stopped at his signal; and the dizzy moment when Jean had said quietly: "Gramercy Park." It was Jean who had said it. Again Gregory felt the reverence and gratitude that had stilled his passion through that dark, silent ride.
Love had meant to her what it had meant to him and he had gloried in her honesty. She had brought back the courage that the weary round of years with Margaret had almost killed, and kept it alive. She had been glad of his success. ”

“ I feel it. We haven't really anything at all," she added, as if facing a fact Roger had avoided.
"I tried to keep it," he said bitterly. "I tried desperately for a long time."
"Did you?"
"Yes, I did. But one can't do those things alone." This was not what he had meant to say, but Anne was looking at him with such cool composure, so safe from all touch of blame in her small assurance of having done all in her power.
"No, of course not. One can't do all the understanding—alone."
Roger felt his anger rising, and stood up, as if by so standing he could reach the calm escaping him. ”

“ As she rested against the pile of cushions Herrick had arranged, and watched the quick western twilight blot the world to night, Jean felt as if for the twenty-four years of her life she must have been fast asleep. All about her men and women had been loving and hating and misunderstanding and hurting each other, and she had been studying books like a child. She had used up much energy and bitterness longing for the moment when she would get out into life and earn her own living, make one of the army that fought its way back and forth each morning and night on the boats. ”

“ It passed and was gone, blotted in his clear understanding of how perfectly well Anne was able to look out for herself. That frail fairness, that delicate sensitiveness behind which she tripped with such deep assurance of herself, was almost a masque in the completeness with which it hid the real Anne. Life would present no problem that would trouble or perplex her. With the scalpel of her assurance she would delicately remove all emotion, all passion, all hot, human weakness, wrap it neatly in her own conceit, label it and forever after know exactly where she had put it. ”

“ Hour after hour Jean sat, staring out to the river, stifled by the fact of death, that great ending containing within itself all the ends of one's smallest acts.
Where was Martha now? Was there nothing anywhere of that patient little figure that had trotted so busily through its daily rounds? Were all the habits and preferences one built up through the years, but things of flesh? Was there nothing left anywhere, in any form, of that gigantic faith? Did man impose upon himself this sentence of life? Summon himself from nowhere, to struggle for a moment, and go back to nothingness again? ”

“ Above this conglomerate of excitement Katya rose like a mountain in her belief and patience. Katya never attacked car-conductors nor urged telephone girls to strike, or bothered whether the social revolution had begun with creation, or whether it was the last stage of progress. Katya worked, often far into the night, and rarely spoke to any one but Tom or Roger. Anne she ignored, not with definite rudeness but with an unfathomable disregard of her existence. In her dark corner Katya was like a brown bear that had been taught to work. ”

“ Jean felt again her rebellion and shame at the sordid ugliness of Martha's sobs and Elsie's whispered rebukes.
"Do you, Alice, take this man, to be your wedded husband ... to love, honor and obey, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?"
"I do."
She, too, had promised, firm in belief of herself, of Herrick, of any test the future might hold. And she had understood nothing, nothing at all. It was a terrible promise to make in one's youth, untried.
"Do you, Sidney, take this woman, to be your wedded wife ... succor and cherish in sickness and in health, until death do you part?" ”

“ Katya shuddered so violently that Roger saw the heavy muscles of her shoulders and neck quiver. "It hurts more than any pain in all the world. It burns out everything in the world, in you, but itself. It takes your brain and your body and makes white ashes of them. It takes you, the individual, and melts you into the world. It is the volcano through which the highest force of spirit finds expression. There are not many volcanoes in the world or the earth would melt in flames. There are not many who can love or the race too would melt away. ”

“ Through the lonely dinners, and long evenings in the studio, Herrick worked himself into a fury that urged him on and held him back. His anger spread from The Kitten to Jean, to all women. He was sick of them, weary of the power they had always had over him. He loathed the women who had yielded to him and the women who had not. He hated his own inability to live his life independent of them. If no woman had ever crossed his life, interfering in its plan, destroying the dreams he had dreamed in those last years of the Connecticut farm, he would long ago have written something worth while. ”

“ Safe in his own well-appointed home, with all the glory of Bay and hills spread out before him, he was going to condemn these to the gray, thick dust of the Portrero, the bleak and windswept hills, the dull, depressing streets of the Mission outskirts. All her life Anne had lived on such a street and hated it with the whole force of her nature.
He had the power to do this thing and he was going to do it. Under the suave kindliness of his slim, perfectly groomed figure, he was like an animal snapping at every morsel that came his way. ”

“ I have less even than Margaret has. Yes, less even than that. She has the shell and I have the kernel, but the kernel has to have its own shell or it dies. No marriage certificate in the world could make her really his wife, but no blindness in the world can keep our love what it is really—like this. I don't believe that society invented marriage because a man wanted to keep one woman as his property or because women wanted to be supported. They were just groping blindly to keep love alive, to bind it fast, that biggest, freest thing in all the world, and keep it safe for itself. ”

“ Anne's thoughts, too vivid to be held within her brain, slipped into the darkness and she saw them, pictures in the thick silence; the terrible black vacuum of life in which moved the old gray men, her father, Hilda, herself, Roger, Tom, the dancing marionettes about him; Hilary Wainwright, his keen-eyed partners in great enterprises; Merle snatching at beauty, the grimed workers; all groups of whirling dervishes, spinning round in useless effort, until they dropped into decay and death. ”

“ Jean's duties were light and she and Gregory spent a part of each day together. The quiet tea-room was now a thing of the past, so far in the past that Jean smiled whenever she remembered how homelike it had once seemed. They had long, lazy afternoons on the sands of nearby beaches, making comments on the human shadows that moved beyond their own world of reality. They chattered like children or were silent as the mood dictated. They had dozens of gay meals, like the first they had prepared on the night that Margaret and Puck had left. ”

“ Before the mills debouching their hundreds at set hours, the miles upon miles of sordid streets, Roger's eyes saddened.
"I don't know—unless it is to make more room."
"Then why not go now—every one, quickly and cleanly—instead of rotting into it?"
"Suicide? No. Not until you're sure anyhow that you can't do anything to make it better. It can't be the purpose of life, this horrible chaos, like the panic at a fire, with the stronger treading down the weak."
Anne shivered. "The strong—as you call them—have been treading on the weak since the beginning of time and will go on to the end. ”